Stephan: This is very alarming news and it is based on a large enough test population that, I think it should be taken very seriously. It suggests that the anti-vaxxers now contracting Covid-19 have done themselves double the harm -- all because of their low cognitive ability which, now it appears, will become even lower. Nationally, the impact is unknown but likely to be very dramatic. As of today, 26 July 2021,34.4 million Americans have contracted this disease. What do you think will be the effect of lowering the cognitive abilities of 10% of our population? As the resport say,"Previous research has also found that a large proportion of COVID-19 survivors are affected by neuropsychiatric and cognitive complications."
What this tells me is that we are going to be living with the effects of Covid-19 for a generation. It will fade from the news, but it will still be active in our lives. This also tells us that there has been, and continues to be, a previously unrecognized social impact on America as a result of the disinformation, and anti-vaxxer nonsense promulgated by Republican officials.
I am going to look for additional papers, this is a major trend, a kind of cultural wound.
People who have recovered from COVID-19 tend to score significantly lower on an intelligence test compared to those who have not contracted the virus, according to new research published in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine. The findings suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 can produce substantial reductions in cognitive ability, especially among those with more severe illness.
“By coincidence, the pandemic escalated in the United Kingdom in the middle of when I was collecting cognitive and mental health data at very large scale as part of the BBC2 Horizon collaboration the Great British Intelligence Test,” said lead researcher Adam Hampshire (@HampshireHub), an associate professor in the Computational, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory at Imperial College London.
People who have recovered from COVID-19 tend to score significantly lower on an intelligence test compared to those who have not contracted the virus, according to new research published in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine. The findings suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 can produce substantial reductions in cognitive […]
Stephan: Here is some good news which, since I come Virginia, I particularly appreciate. As Florida, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Missouri and other former slave states have militantly sought to destroy democracy, Virginia went in the opposite direction as this report describes. Bravo Virginia.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, one of the Freedom Riders who was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961, speaks to voting rights activists during a stop of Black Voters Matter’s “Freedom Ride for Voting Rights” bus tour at Monroe Park on June 25, 2021, in Richmond, Virginia. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty
On July 1, the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the only major section of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 still in force with its ruling in the Arizona case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Virginia Voting Rights Act went into effect, providing broad protections against voter suppression, discrimination, and intimidation. As Republican-controlled states across the South raced to establish new voting restrictions in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, Democratic-controlled Virginia ultimately moved in the opposite direction by passing legislation that will protect the state’s marginalized voters and expand ballot access.
Facing South recently spoke with Tram Nguyen, co-executive director of the voting rights group New Virginia Majority, who helped craft the Virginia law. Modeled after the federal […]
Stephan: I committed myself to foster racial equality when I was a boy of nine and witnessed an act of racial prejudice that I found inexplicable, offensive, and very unfair. When I stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and heard Dr. King give the "I Have a Dream" speech, then-President Johnson sign the Voting Rights Acts, and the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 65, then watched Colin Powell, a Black man become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, the highest military office in the country, I thought that although there were surely still racist in the country that as a whole the culture had entered a new phase. Boy was I wrong. About a third of American whites, egged on by the racist in chief Donald Trump, I now realize are as deeply racist as their grandparents were. White supremacy I now understand, amongst that cohort, is as alive and well as it has been since America's colonial days. The only good news I see is that younger people do seem to be healing this cancer and that Hispanics clearly are doing better.
Credit: The New York Times
One question lingers amid all the debates about critical race theory: How racist is this land? Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knows about the oppression of the Native Americans, about slavery and Jim Crow. But does that mean that America is even now a white supremacist nation, that whiteness is a cancer that leads to oppression for other groups? Or is racism mostly a part of America’s past, something we’ve largely overcome?
There are many ways to answer these questions. The most important is by having honest conversations with the people directly affected. But another is by asking: How high are the barriers to opportunity for different groups? Do different groups have a fair shot at the American dream? This approach isn’t perfect, but at least it points us to empirical data rather than just theory and supposition.
When we apply this lens to the African American experience we see that barriers to opportunity are still very high. The income gap separating white and Black families was basically
Stephan: This is an early example of what I see as a growing trend, and I think we are going to see much more of this. Water is destiny, and it is going to internationally shape geopolitics and inner-nationally social stability.
Iran’s former deputy environment minister Kaveh Madani being interviewed on CNN about the Iranian water shortage. Video screengrab
Mismanagement is to blame and much of the damage is irreversible, according to exiled minister Kaveh Madani
Days of protests over water shortages have rapidly evolved into anti-regime demonstrations across the country
LONDON: Iran is “water bankrupt” due to years of mismanagement by the regime, according to an exiled member of Tehran’s environmental ministry. The result is the severe water shortages that have triggered days of unrest and violence.
Scientist Kaveh Madani, Iran’s former deputy environment minister, told The Times newspaper that all sources of water are running dry, including rivers, reservoirs and groundwater.
The collapse of these essential systems even prompted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to admit that the protesters might have a point. “We cannot really blame the people,” he said of the thousands of Iranians who have taken to the streets in Khuzestan Province in recent days to protest against the shortage of clean drinking water. At least eight protesters have been killed in the regime’s crackdown on the demonstrations. It has been reported […]
Stephan: The American illness profit system is an abomination and a disgrace. Overall it is mediocre at best -- 37th in the world according to the WHO -- and obscenely expensive. So expensive that when you tell people in other nations what it costs for say an uncomplicated vaginal birth, they look at you as if you are mad, and then tell you how sorry they are. Here is the American reality. How is it that Americans tolerate this?
Baby got bills
For the last couple of months my wife and I have been playing a quintessentially American game of Guess the Baby Bill. The rules are simple: try to guess exactly how much we would be charged for the birth of our daughter earlier this year. Last week the hospital bill finally came, putting an end to the guessing game. The cost of an uncomplicated vaginal birth? $37,617.69.
Anyway, the good news is that we don’t have to pay the entire bill: our health insurance covers about $31,000 – leaving us with a balance of around $6,000. Although, of course, that doesn’t make the ridiculously high prices OK. We’re still covering the costs indirectly via our enormous insurance premiums. Which, we were recently informed by Oxford Health, part of UnitedHealth Group, are going to go up by 16% next year. But it’s understandable, I guess. They need that money to do the things health companies are supposed to do: maximise profits, boost the share price and pay their executives huge amounts of money. The UnitedHealth Group’s chief executive made […]
